My Experience as a TA

I may have mentioned it briefly in a previous post, but I’ve been a Teaching Assistant at UNC’s Coding Bootcamp for the past 3 or 4 months.The UNC program is six months long and meets nights and weekends so some students are able to work full time while doing the course. The course is full stack Javascript, so students learn basic HTML and CSS, jQuery and browser Javascript, Node, Express, MySQL, MongoDB, React, and a whole host of other things. It’s a really ambitious program and I think the students will be really well prepared for junior dev roles when they graduate in early August.

It’s also been awesome for me. I had experience with some of these things, mostly front end javascript, but learning the back end Javascript ecosystem has been very rewarding. Learning all these new technologies was a big reason that I wanted to help with the course.

I’ve absolutely loved the whole experience. I had been a TA at Railsbridge events before, so I had an inkling that I might enjoy it, but I just really enjoy introducing people to new concepts and helping them work through problems and generally just being around to be helpful while they’re learning so many new things. I recognize that its a really stressful time in their lives and a lot of them are stretched very thin by the heavy course load and their other commitments, and I really pride myself on being empathetic when they’re struggling and positive all times.

I’ve also enjoyed it and appreciated it because I really think that diversity in tech is important, and code schools are proven way to help get minorities into the tech pipeline. It’s mostly white men who graduate from comp sci programs, so I really like actively contributing the avenue with which many traditionally unrepresented groups are coming into tech.